Finlay Donovan is the only one of the contemporary “female amateur sleuth” book series’ I know I can reliably pick up, read, and enjoy every single paFinlay Donovan is the only one of the contemporary “female amateur sleuth” book series’ I know I can reliably pick up, read, and enjoy every single page of without fail. This newest installment is no exception. I don’t actually think I’ve enjoyed an installment this much, or even laughed so hard, since the first book in the series.
Ever since the end of the third book we knew Finlay Donovan Rolls the Dice was going to be a wild ride. Finlay, Vero, and the kids in Atlantic City? What could go wrong, right? (Of course everything’s going to go wrong. That’s exactly what happens in these books. That’s why we have Finlay Donovan books!) Well, of course Finlay’s ex-husband insists she can’t go without him because she can’t take the kids across state lines without his permission. Oh! And then there’s her mom, who for some reason has decided she needs to take a vacation too!
This won’t be awkward at all. Not even once Nick and his FBI friends show up in Atlantic City as well. In the same motel, too. That hallway sure is crowded.
The Finlay Donovan books have always been a great vehicle for Elle Cosimano to explore marriage dynamics, motherhood, single parenting, female friendships, the struggles of being a working mother, and all the other buttons and bows that come with being a post-divorce adult woman with children. When your marriage is over and all you have is your kids and your work life can become pretty stagnant if you let it. Finlay’s adventures remind readers–if in a rather extreme manner–that there’s a lot of life to live out there. There’s a lot to do, see, and laugh at. That’s one of the things I love about these books the most.
If we get to have an awesome and fun time while reading about it, then that’s spectacular too.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
File Under: 5 Star Review/Amateur Sleuths/Book Series/Comedy/Crime Fiction/Mystery ...more
What Happened to Nina? is another great novel to add to my list titled: “Books That Scream, ‘F*ck the Patriarchy’”. This list is, of course, not only What Happened to Nina? is another great novel to add to my list titled: “Books That Scream, ‘F*ck the Patriarchy’”. This list is, of course, not only filled with books that make me so mad at the patriarchy while reading it makes me want to scream (not that I don’t live every day like this), but also filled with books where whatever/whomever is standing in for the symbol of the patriarchy in the book gets some just desserts.
(Can I just note, very briefly, that I absolutely hate the cover for this book? I can’t stand it. I’m sorry.)
What Happened to Nina? is a slightly misleading title, because we find out, rather nebulously, what happened to Nina in the prologue of the book. This book isn’t about Nina: It’s about the aftermath of her disappearance. It’s about her working-class family, the boyfriend that came home from their week-long vacation when she didn’t, about his rich and influential family, about privilege, about the members of law enforcement working the case, about domestic abuse in college-aged couples, about friends keeping secrets and enemies spreading lies, and it’s a lot about how far parents will go for their kids (and maybe some thoughts of how far should you go?).
Dervla McTiernan writes an impeccably-plotted, well-paced, multiple-POV tale that threads a riot of emotions through a small town and two families divided by money, intellect, grit, love, and humanity. It doesn’t end pretty, but I like a lot of stories better that way because in real life a lot of stories like this don’t have pretty endings. Sometimes they don’t have endings at all.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
File Under: 5 Star Review/Crime Fiction/Psychological Fiction/Suspense Thriller ...more
Black Wolf doesn’t pick up exactly where Red Queen (which I also rated four stars, though for different reasons) leaves off, but the same subject is oBlack Wolf doesn’t pick up exactly where Red Queen (which I also rated four stars, though for different reasons) leaves off, but the same subject is on Antonia Scott’s mind now as then. So it stands to reason that Inspector Jon Gutierrez not only has his partner’s back in this endeavor, but that he’s also trying his best to shield his queen from all harm. That includes harm to herself.
Sometimes that’s a thankless endeavor, or at least a fruitless one, especially since Antonia is convinced their last case is connected to what happened to her husband and that accepting no assignments until these phantoms have been run to ground is their story and they’re sticking to it. Well, they were sticking to it until a mafioso’s pregnant wife narrowly escaped being assassinated in a shopping mall and then vanished into the wind. Now their boss wants Scott and Gutierrez to find her. The thing is: There’s a lot of people looking for this woman, and they all seem to have different interests.
Black Wolf is just as good as Red Queen, but for totally different reasons. The breakneck pace of Red Queen has slowed down a bit in exchange for a hurry-up-and-wait approach, because in this book there isn’t the ever-looming presence of a ticking clock bearing down on our characters and the plot. In my opinion, this is a good thing, because it allows us to get to know both Antonia and Jon more as people, which is a luxury we didn’t get in the first book. We learn about Jon, his loneliness, his struggles with being a queer man who’s large, and his longing for a loving relationship. We get to learn more about Antonia’s training, her feelings about her son and her fears about being a mother, her guilt and resentment surrounding the decline in her husband’s health, and her fears about becoming too reliant on Jon. The pacing suffers a little, but the story is interesting and a quickly developing subplot surrounding the entire Red Queen project kept things interesting around the perimeter.
I’m going to be very interested in seeing how this trilogy ends.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
File Under: Book Series/Crime Fiction/Crime Thriller/Murder Thriller/Suspense Thriller
Want something salacious, titillating, fun, and just engrossing enough to keep you engaged without you letting your mai tai become watered-down mush, Want something salacious, titillating, fun, and just engrossing enough to keep you engaged without you letting your mai tai become watered-down mush, miss the time when your sunscreen needs to be re-applied, or making sure your little ones (fur or not) haven’t wandered out of sight? I honestly think Sun Damage is a great book for that. If I had to pick a book that fits my definition of a “beach read” this would be it (disclaimer: I read this in bed because my ankle is still broken, so it is what it is).
This is a really entertaining book, even if it’s not a masterpiece. It’s just fun. For start, they’re hitting me in my soft spot: grifters. I love a good grift. I love a good con. I love fictional people who lie for a living. Who lie to live. I guess you could even say I love just thieves in general, of which grifters are a particular type of. Grifters, however, are more than thieves: they’re actors, psychologists, cultural anthropologists, human geographers, linguists, sociologists, demographers, philosophers, and jacks of all trades. They have to be able to pick up just about anything on the fly and learn it to competency in a very compact time frame. You have to be quick, smart, and able to turn on a dime. That’s what makes books about grifting so dang fun.
I get the feeling this book was supposed to be evenly character-driven and plot-driven, but I felt it was a combination of plot-driven and atmosphere-driven, if that makes sense. I didn’t really get a solid feel for any of the people staying at the house our FMC takes refuge at under the auspices of LuLu under the pretense of being their holiday chef. I feel like I was supposed to, but I really didn’t end up caring about any of them except Rob, the author. I was, however, living for the constant feeling of weight: the oppressive heat and humidity weighing everyone down, the sun beating on everyone’s heads, the guilt weighing our protagonist down, the secrets like stones in her pockets, the sweat soaking her clothing, the constant suspense of whether or not she was going to be caught or found suffocating her more and more with every day that passes…
Like I said: It’s a good read. Something you’d read once and really enjoy on a lovely vacation and then tell a friend they really should get a copy to take with them to the beach. Or you can just lay under your ceiling fan with a cold drink and imagine you’re at the beach. That’ll work too.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, ideas, and views expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
The Rumor Game is an interesting historical thriller set in Boston during WWII, featuring a female reporter who works to stoReal Rating: 3.5 / 5 Stars
The Rumor Game is an interesting historical thriller set in Boston during WWII, featuring a female reporter who works to stop the spread of disinformation with a column in her local paper and male FBI agent who’s assignment is supposed to be preventing sabotage of industries vital to the war effort in and around Boston (the town being a vital port city). On the surface, the only thing the two seem to have in common is a hatred of Nazis. War makes for strange bedfellows, though, and soon it proves that these two have a lot of connections, both personally and professionally.
The Rumor Game has a great story, but my great issue is that it doesn’t ever seem to come together cohesively. It’s all over the place, narratively. There are a lot of threads to pull on, and not all of them are pulled on equally. Some are left dangling for too long and when Mullen comes back to them it’s been so long that it feels almost confusing. Some threads are resolved a little too neatly, or not in a satisfactory manner for the amount of outrage they elicited for the characters in the story (who deserved better). At times it also felt like Mullen may have been having his own characters act stupider than they were being otherwise written, because their ignorance regarding certain matters beggared belief.
It’s a cool story with great atmosphere but there’s a lot missing from it. If it had a tighter plot I would’ve loved it a lot more.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
First off, I had this mislabeled in my spreadsheet, so this review is a week late. Whoops. Sorry. So many ARCs, so little focus.
One of the Boys.
One oFirst off, I had this mislabeled in my spreadsheet, so this review is a week late. Whoops. Sorry. So many ARCs, so little focus.
One of the Boys.
One of them.
Let’s talk about self-fulfilling prophecies. Let’s talk about socioeconomic and sociocultural influences on parenting and child behavior. Let’s talk about biological and environmental influences on physiological and psychological development. Let’s talk about a piece of scientific misinformation that stems from chromosomal research done in the 1960s that led to a certain percentage of the male population of the western world being labeled as “super predators”.
In 1960’s Scotland, chromosomal research was being carried out on males that were developmentally disabled and being kept at a state hospital. It’s a long story, but the males who tested as having a chromosomal karotype of XYY and were mischaracterized as being overly aggressive and violent. This was a heavily cherry-picked study with absurdly skewed results, and all studies on the subject that followed over the next decade were fruits of that same poisonous tree. Needless to say, these studies were then used as excuses for eugenics debates, racist debates, abortion debates, and even tied to serial killers like Richard Speck (who was never tested for it) before the scientific stigma started to fade away in the 1980s. Sadly, Hollywood was still having a bit of fun with the trope into the 1990s. It’s not a trope that’s trotted out anymore; I assume it’s because the karotypes are tied to developmental disabilities and we’d like to think ourselves a bit above writing books characterizing people with developmental disabilities as some sort of super predator simply based on their chromosomes.
One of the Boys, however, doesn’t use the XYY debate as its premise. I only bring it up because that’s usually where plot ideas like these come from. Instead, this plot seems based in the more dystopian, speculative fiction, Gattaca-esque quadrant of fiction, where science seems to have figured out a way to weed out the wheat from the chaff when it comes to boys. And one would think, given how much we debate the violence of men these days, that a book like this might give female readers some relief; but we all know that’s not how it works. That’s not how reality works. Because as much as we women frown when people say, “not all men,” in our hearts we know not all men are bad. It’s simply that enough of them are. In this book, the men are bad not because of a gene, but because there are so many other factors that need to be taken into account besides a gene. After all, there were bad men before there was a gene to detect. There’s always been bad men. A detectable gene only gives some of them an excuse for their bad behavior.
That’s how Jayne Cowie writes this book, and she writes it brilliantly. Two sisters, so different in constitution, disposition, and behavior. Two sons, one for each of them, one tested for the gene and one not tested because the mother doesn’t think a test can replace parenting and she doesn’t want her child labeled by society before he even has a chance to make his way to adulthood. They both live very different lives: one filled with privilege and everything she and her son could want, and the other moving from place to place living from hand to mouth trying to keep her and her son safe.
The two boys conspire to bring one to the other, because he’s 18 and wants to be tested because he feels he might be arrested for being in an illegal fight and wants to know his status once and for all. This sets off a rapid-fire chain of events that unravels the secrets between the two sisters, the two boys, and three families in total.
It’s not a perfect book, because you can see some of it coming a mile away, but it’s a thought-provoking, propulsive, page-turning one. I couldn’t put it down. It will get your mind turning and thinking about all those boys out there who’ve been cast aside by society for looking a certain way or dressing a certain way. It’ll remind you that science isn’t perfect and sometimes it’s not the right answer. And it’ll remind you that even if you think you have the answers, parenthood always surprises you.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
If it’s okay with all of you I’m just going to start calling Gillian McAllister’s books, “Thriller Games of Truth with Consequences: The Ethical DilemIf it’s okay with all of you I’m just going to start calling Gillian McAllister’s books, “Thriller Games of Truth with Consequences: The Ethical Dilemma Edition”. I’m not saying that to be insulting in any way, shape, or form. It’s simply that both of the books I’ve read of hers (Wrong Place, Wrong Time and now Just Another Missing Person) were both largely domestic thrillers revolving around mothers who faced huge ethical dilemmas involving their child and the cost of telling the truth would have major consequences for both them and their child. So the idea behind the whole book is, “How do I save my child? Should they be saved? If I do this, should I try to save myself too, or should I pay the price for the crime my child committed?”.
In Wrong Place, Wrong Time, the plot largely centered on a mom and her son. In Just Another Missing Person, however, we’ve got more than one parent facing an ethical dilemma and potential consequences for unlawful behavior in the name of either protecting or avenging their child. Heck, we’ve got ethical dilemmas just about everywhere we turn. Guess what? I’m here for it. I was so into this book I didn’t want to come out. I lost track of time.
This is one of those rare thrillers that actually managed to shock the heck out of me. The first turn actually caused me to shout, “What the f*ck?”
There were a few more surprises after that (not going to say how many), but they were all actual surprises and they were all welcome ones. At no time did I feel like McAllister had just shoehorned a turn in just so she could screw with us readers to pad the book. Every time we needed to change direction it was obvious why we had to and it ended up making sense. This book was thoughtfully, carefully, strategically constructed. I loved Wrong Place, Wrong Time, but I think I love Just Another Missing Person more simply because it has this vibe surrounding all the characters that says, “You all f*cked around and found out”. And they did. They all found out the cost of turning your back on the ethics of your profession or your place in someone’s life. And then there’s that murky, blurry, shadowy place: what’s the ethics when the love and need to protect your child runs right into the ethics of your profession? What then?
I can’t recommend it enough. It’s a book not to be missed.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
This book has a split personality. The first half is full of splendid storytelling told either from the POV oOh, what highs! But then, oh, what lows.
This book has a split personality. The first half is full of splendid storytelling told either from the POV of a woman named Kace or in first-person prescient (which is a little-used narrative POV but one of my favorites). This first half, which takes place in the present day but reads like it takes place in the Old West, starts inside a women’s prison in Arizona with the stories of Florida and Dios, two of the prison’s inmates. It’s the time of COVID, and as much as no one likes the idea of being locked up, being locked up during a pandemic is putting them all even more on edge than usual. The prose is spellbinding, the plot relevant, and the social commentary compelling. I found myself sinking into the book, caught up in this cat and mouse game Dios is playing with Florida, trying to get Florida to admit she’s just the same as Dios and just as angry and violent as her, too. Dios wants to bring Florida down to her level, and she’s not beyond breaking a whole lot of laws in the process. Dios has an obsession, and Florida is it. Florida has an obsession too: getting to Los Angeles and back to her mother’s home to pick up her car and personal belongings before then driving back to Arizona before her first check-in with her parole officer.
I could’ve read that book–this book–just the way it is for the entire novel. Just Dios and Florida playing cat and mouse, catch and release, all over hill and dale as Florida tries to get to her car and Dios keeps dragging her down, down, down and then see how it ends.
But then there had to be part two. And that’s where this book lost me completely.
Up until this point there had been three POV’s: Florida, Kace, and Dios. In part two, all of a sudden, Dios’ POV disappears almost entirely and in its place is the POV of Lobos, a female cop that’s been assigned the case of Florida and Dios since they violated parole and a violent crime was committed during the act. But who committed the act? Was it both of them? One of them? Why was this guy killed anyway?
Like Florida, Dios, and Kace, Lobos has her own damage. Lobos even has a sexist partner that made me grind my teeth. It was established from the beginning that this book was largely about how the system victimizes females no matter their age, race, mental health, socioeconomic background, or line of work and then doesn’t think we have either the right or ability to get angry or violent and to do something about it. Taking it even further, if we dare try and do something about it, we’re somehow less than human to society. Bringing a cop who has a lot of her own issues surrounding anger towards men due to being abused by her husband into the story halfway through and practically letting her take over half of the narrative was not only jarring for the whole plot, but it was upsetting in general because we lost the strong narrative voice of Dios so this cop could amble around Los Angeles investigating the duo and jumping at shadows thinking her husband is around every corner.
Had Pochoda chosen to keep the story contained to Florida, Dios, and Kace, I believe this would’ve been a truly great novel. Her choice to split it down the middle like she did made it mediocre.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Owing to personal policy, all reviews rated three stars or under are not posted to social media or bookseller websites. Thank you. ...more
I don’t think I’ve read a book so obviously padded with unnecessary filler material before. This shouldn’t have been a novel–it should’ve been a novelI don’t think I’ve read a book so obviously padded with unnecessary filler material before. This shouldn’t have been a novel–it should’ve been a novella. There wasn’t enough story here to make a novel and it shows.
This book is filled with multiple POVs, and that’s fine, but there’s one POV that doesn’t fit and is so poorly written I ended up skipping every instance when it occurred after the first few times because it came across as evil villain monologuing. It was cheesy and that was where most of the filler sat.
As for the rest of the book? It was messy. It was unorganized. It felt like something that landed in a slush pile and I don’t know how any editor let it get this far. I don’t recommend it at all.
A copy of this title was provided by NetGalley and the author. Any thoughts, opinions, ideas, and views expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you. Personal policy dictates that since this title has earned a rating of three stars or below the review will not appear on social media or any bookseller websites. ...more
The Professor is Nossett’s second novel after 2022’s The Resemblance (which I also rated five stars), the second to feature Marlitt Kaplan as the protThe Professor is Nossett’s second novel after 2022’s The Resemblance (which I also rated five stars), the second to feature Marlitt Kaplan as the protagonist, and so, of course, it follows the same genre feel as its predecessor: a murder/crime thriller with dark academia themes set on and around the University of Georgia campus. Where The Resemblance has a plot centering around sexual assault, rape culture, and Greek life; The Professor focuses on the mental health of both professors and students, how little colleges and universities do to help either party deal with these matters, and how hard it is for professors to maintain a healthy work-life balance with their workloads and pressure to publish or perish in order to gain tenure so they don’t have to work for peanuts.
It’s also a bit about setting boundaries, knowing when to say you’re sorry, acknowledging your failings, accepting the things you can’t change, and rebuilding your life from the ashes.
I am going to note that this book can be read as a standalone, but it’s a whole lot more enjoyable and easier to relate to if you read The Resemblance first. Telling you why would require a lot of exposition, and that’s not what reviews are for. But you’ve been warned.
Lauren Nossett has honed her protagonist, Marlitt, into a fine blade, and she knows exactly how to wield her. You can tell that Nossett must spend a lot of time living inside Marlitt’s head, just thinking and hypothesizing as to how Marlitt would react to any given situation, because Marlitt’s inner narrative and dialogue just flows so seamlessly throughout the pages. There’s not a single hiccough. Nossett also thinks every single plot thread through, leaving nary a string loose. She doesn’t rely on logical fallacies to hold up her plot: you won’t find any red herrings here. We are shown the exposition via the lens of those who experience it and those scenes inform the characterizations of the major players in a way third-person POV never could. It was a very effective tool to humanize characters we otherwise wouldn’t have gotten close enough to so we could empathize with their pain. Putting us right there with them helped us identify with their plights and struggles, letting us inside their heads where not even Marlitt could go.
It’s another brilliant effort by Nossett and I’ll need it in my bookcase ASAP. I have a feeling the next one will end up there too. I can’t get enough.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. In this case, I’d like to extend my thanks directly to author Lauren Nossett, who was kind enough to personally ensure a NetGalley widget made it to my inbox. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. This review was written without any offer or acceptance of compensation. Thank you.
The cover promises way more thrills than the book actually delivers.
The problem with The Followers isn’t the plot, because it’s actually a really gooThe cover promises way more thrills than the book actually delivers.
The problem with The Followers isn’t the plot, because it’s actually a really good plot. The issue is the characters. Not only does one of the two female protagonists not seem to know how to Google or have any semblance of common sense even though she’s an influencer with millions of followers, but I just couldn’t connect with any of the characters. I just didn’t identify with them and, as a result, I was just very bored.
I also didn’t care about (and was really annoyed by) all the snippets of chats or forums full of hate for Molly. They ripped me out of the story and were annoying. I’m seeing this method of exposition used in more and more books and I’ve ended up rating every book that uses this method lower than other books I read. An infodump is an infodump. Readers aren’t dumb.
So I’d like to say this book is terrific and groundbreaking, but it’s simply very average.
Thanks to Blackstone Publishing and Bradleigh Godfrey for sending me a copy of the physical ARC of this book for review. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Personal policy dictates that since this title earned a three star or lower rating this review will not appear on any of my social media channels or any bookseller websites. ...more
I read the blurb for this book and couldn’t wait to read it. I wanted to read it so badly, so I was thrilled when I was approved for the ARC. It soundI read the blurb for this book and couldn’t wait to read it. I wanted to read it so badly, so I was thrilled when I was approved for the ARC. It sounded like that song from the musical “Chicago”: The Cell Block Tango, you know?
He had it comin’ He had it comin’ He only had himself to blame If you’d have been there If you’d have seen it I betcha you would have done the same
You know that feeling when that number is on screen or stage, right? How it starts out titillating and tense? How you’re filled with curiosity and suspense? Each woman tells her tale, sordid yet unapologetic, because her man was a bad man and the system certainly didn’t care what he did to her–they only cared that she was a murderer. And then the chorus explodes into a thrilling frenzy between each tale, with all the women imploring the audience to understand what the system didn’t.
Yeah, no. That’s not what this book was. It’s not what it sounded like, felt like, or read like. How this book qualifies as a thriller I have no idea, because it bored me to tears. I honestly almost DNFd it, but I made a promise to myself to try to DNF less books this year simply because they weren’t “my thing” and try to persevere. In the case of this book, I was treated to three different unwarranted naps because it put me to sleep all to find out the killer was exactly who I thought it was.
Look, I get what the book was trying to do and I applaud the effort. The idea was even top-notch. However, the execution was totally lacking. Stilted prose, too many coincidences, and not even thrills to raise a single goosebump make this book time I won’t get back.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you. Due to personal policy, this review will not appear on any social media or bookseller website owing to its three star or lower review.
File Under: Crime Thriller/Just Not For Me/MurderThriller/Suspense Thriller ...more
I enjoyed the last Golding book I read, but this book is a hard no from me.
If you’re going to write a book where your main protagonist comes from an I enjoyed the last Golding book I read, but this book is a hard no from me.
If you’re going to write a book where your main protagonist comes from an insular and superstitious group of people like circus people, then you had better make sure to do your research and be accurate. This is my first and largest complaint. Golding simply didn’t do her research.
Who’s to know whether or not a British traditional circus would turn away a stakeholding member with the sight in real life? It’s certainly not impossible. But traditionally, circuses have been the safe haven of anyone a little different, weird, or otherwise seen as an outcast by society. It doesn’t make sense that someone would be cast out for having the sight, especially if they were family. Circus is all about found family.
Circuses also still have their own code and vernacular that’s used both during shows and when the public isn’t around. It doesn’t matter what country you’re in. The lingo pretty much doesn’t change much because it reaches across language barriers.
I was reading Golding’s book and I wasn’t seeing any of this. None of the terms that I knew the characters should be using were being spoken. And WHOMP. There goes your worldbuilding before the first half of the first act is done. If you don’t even go to the trouble to build your world, how are we supposed to care about your book?
Now, I know this book isn’t entirely about the circus, but nothing about this book made me care about it. The prose was blah. The plot was blah. The characters were blah. It just all simply felt like Golding had phoned it in.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you....more
While I’ve been reading this over the last 1.5 days (in my bed, in the ER waiting room while my dad gets his heart checked out, while at home relaxingWhile I’ve been reading this over the last 1.5 days (in my bed, in the ER waiting room while my dad gets his heart checked out, while at home relaxing after, and then I finished it while lounging in bed this morning) and I’ve tried talking to anyone about this book, the first question I’ve gotten when I tell them the title is, “Wait. Like the song?” The second question I get is, “It sounds like that’s gotta be corny. Is it corny?”
My friends, as someone who totally dislikes The Chicks (I can’t listen to Natalie Maines because her voice grates on my nerves–it’s not about their music), I gotta tell you this book isn’t corny. I came into this book justifiably skeptical but willing to take a chance because I really loved the cover, and I ended up unexpectedly not only liking it, but loving it. It’s split up into three acts, takes places in two different story timelines (2004 when the four protagonists are seniors in high school and 2019 is the present day time in the book), and is told in turns by all four main characters (the author chose to use third person limited with each character when it’s their chapter instead of going with third-person omniscient for the whole novel).
But first, let’s get the two reasons why I didn’t rate this five stars out of the way really quick before I get into everything I did like.
One reason I had to dock the book some points: In the back half of the book (the book is split into three acts, so it might even just be in the third act), the 2004 and 2019 timeline narratives first have to make way for emails between all four of the girls as two of them have moved away after high school and two have stayed in their small hometown; and then the main storylines and those emails have to make space for transcripts of police interviews from various town citizens who come in to give voluntary statements. That’s a whole lot of stuff going on all at once, and it makes the book too busy and also too long. I would’ve recommended greatly reducing or even just removing the emails between the girls to reduce the length of the novel. I was ready for the book to end at least 50 to 75 pages before it did. That’s not much, but it’s enough to affect the reading experience.
The second reason I felt some points needed to be docked: Devon. What the heck was the point of all of that? It was confusing and then anti-climatic. I’m not going to spoil it. If you read this then maybe you’ll understand.
Now we’re onto the good stuff!
I don’t put stock into how companies like Amazon categorize a book, because it feels unfair to cage in books that are so many things down to only three categories. This book can’t just be pinned down to one thing. It’s part coming of age tale, part crime fiction, part revenge tale, and part “I will do anything for my family” story. It’s also a story about found family, abusers, victims, survivors, addicts, the patriarchy, the south, absentee parents, white privilege, racism, loss, grief, running from your problems, grief, first loves, trauma, sisterhood, misogyny, music, tradition, falling in love, the sweet cowboys, watching a lot of Dateline, and promises you keep no matter what.
These four girls became sisters from another mister at the age of five while playing in a church basement in their small southern town of Goldie, population just a little over 2,000. Kasey is biracial and being raised by a single mom. Ada has two loving and wealthy parents. Rosemarie is black and has two parents who are total hippies. And Caroline has two parents who divorced and then abandoned her to the care of her grandmother, Mimi. Four girls walking four totally different paths in life, but always stepping together, in sync, hand in hand with one another and never forgetting one another or leaving one behind. They make promises to one another and to the whole of them and they don’t break them. Kasey and Rosemarie left after high school but came back eventually, and with them came a reckoning.
I very obviously recommend this book. I laughed, I cried (it’s hard to get me to cry while reading), I felt touched, and I’m so happy I gave this book a chance.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
File Under: Coming of Age/Crime Fiction/Found Family/General Fiction/LGBTQ Friendly/Vigilantes/Women’s Fiction...more
This book is fine, and that’s the issue. It’s…fine. It’s a good read. It’s interesting enough.
But from its generic cover toReal Rating: 3.5 / 5 Stars
This book is fine, and that’s the issue. It’s…fine. It’s a good read. It’s interesting enough.
But from its generic cover to underwhelming prose (this book is categorized as literary fiction and I couldn’t disagree with that assessment more) to trite predictability, This Is How We End Things is just another average psychological thriller with lofty aspirations.
I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy the book, because I did, but only in certain places and in certain aspects because this book suffers from hefty unevenness. To be brief about it: In my opinion, this book only gets interesting when it talks about the psychological aspects of the plot. Whenever we get to the characters on a personal level, though? The whole thing wilts. Maybe that just betrays my love of social psychology, abnormal psychology, and sociology, because the whole reason I wanted to read this book is because I’m fascinated by the art of deception. Maybe I’m biased because I wanted way more psychology and way less interpersonal drama. Who knows? All I know is today this book was just another average psychological thriller that gets some extra brownies points for keeping my attention and being a little more interesting than the others.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
I went into this book expecting something different than what I got. Sometimes, this can be a good thing. This time, it’s not entirely the “blurb baitI went into this book expecting something different than what I got. Sometimes, this can be a good thing. This time, it’s not entirely the “blurb bait” that turned me sour, it was the prose. Jim Bartley may think he’s written a clever dark comedy full of unfortunate violence in the tradition of the Coen Brothers, but the book never comes off as that clever. It just comes off as quite boring.
I was also hoping there would be more to the romance between Wes and Cam than what was portrayed in the book. I’m not talking about explicitness–I’m talking about mentioning it at all in any terms besides just mentioning it as an afterthought here or there or whenever someone else brings it up in a (historically-accurate) derogatory way. The way their relationship is portrayed almost makes it feel cheap.
It was just a disappointment on my end.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you. Due to this review being three stars or lower this review will not appear in social media. ...more
If there’s one fusion of genres I’ve come to appreciate a great deal in the last couple of years it’s science fiction and noir. It’s not a new genre, If there’s one fusion of genres I’ve come to appreciate a great deal in the last couple of years it’s science fiction and noir. It’s not a new genre, having roots going back 30+ years, but it’s new to me. The first novel I read with this kind of flavor to it was last year’s The Paradox Hotel, which I absolutely couldn’t put down (just like this book), rated five stars (just like this book), and which occupies a well-deserved spot on my crowded bookshelves (which this book does as well, thanks to Knopf and Penguin Random House). There’s something about the cold, implacable march of science with its empirical laws and rules of evidence and the cool, calm facade of a detective who has their own laws and rules of evidence to follow that simply creates a fascinating, mutually beneficial relationship that can result in some of the most fascinating stories about the human condition. Titanium Noir is a story that has a lot of story to tell and most of it isn’t pretty, but all of it is about some kind of love.
No noir novel is complete without a socioeconomic divide (in this case, a river and lake divide one side from the other–the rich and the not-rich). In the world of Titanium Noir, money doesn’t only mean you live in nicer houses and have better healthcare. It also means you might just make enough money to become a Titan. Not a titan of industry, but one of a select number of people who can afford to be injected with a genetic therapy formula called T7, which will rewind and repair all damage time or injury has inflicted on you. A literal bodily reset. The monetary cost is astronomical. Changes to your body? Yeah, there’s some of those too. You won’t ever be the same again and people will never look at you the same way again. You’re a Titan now, and there’s power in merely being you. The power exchange is too great to overcome now.
Our protagonist, Cal Sounder, is a private detective on paper. In reality, he walks the thin line between the police and the Titans. He looks into things on the Titan’s side of the fence for the police from time to time and he looks into things on the poorer side of town for the Titans from time to time. This time around, he’s been retained by the police as a consultant on a case a little too hot for them to handle: A Titan has been murdered.
The worldbuilding in this book is simply great. Take the gritty, icy streets of Chicago in winter and marry it to the neon city you’d see in an anime like Ghost in the Shell or Akira, and that’s the feel I got from the book. Crazy nightclubs, dirty dive bars, weird socialist social clubs, fusion restaurants, an elite university, a multinational conglomerate, apartment buildings, and a pig farm. This book visits a great many locales, all different from one another and fascinating in their own way given the landscape.
Cal has that same cool, implacable facade of a practiced detective, but with far more leeway than a badge. His morals are a lot more flexible, too. That’s why he’s good at his job. He’s an enigmatic and charismatic character. He’s far more than he seems and capable of far more than you’d be able to discern, but it’s not until the book puts him into a situation that you get to see that Cal Sounder is a man of quick reflexes, wit, resources, and more. He has the trademark cynicism and wariness that comes from being surrounded by criminals and death as a profession, but he has one bright thing in his life and he keeps going, knowing she’s still around and waiting.
The dialogue in this book is amazing. It’s all over the place in tone, just like human conversation should be, but you can read the shifts in tone as if they were being spoken and not written. It has razor-sharp wit, barbed sarcasm, tired musings over cups of bitter coffee, weary late-night conversations, exasperated arguments in hallways and alleyways, demented and dislocated words and phrases uttered under pain and duress, words softly spoken by soft lamplight in the late hours, and pessimistic rants from exhausted cops expressed at all hours of night and day.
The plot is engrossing from the start, leaving the book an absolute page-turner you can’t put down. It absolutely feels like you can’t stop reading, because you never know when something bonkers, bloody, revelatory, or just plain interesting is going to happen. The book just keeps moving because Cal just keeps on moving. Unless he’s hurt. Then he stops for a minute.
The ending might surprise you. It might not. I loved the ending, even though I guessed who the killer was. Keep in mind that the ending and the killer are two separate things. This is a story about love, after all. It’s just about different kinds of love. The killer and the ending are not about the same kinds of love. No matter what, though, this book is absolutely a killer read.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. I also received a physical early review copy of this book from Knopf and Penguin Random House as part of their influencer program (thank you). All opinions, thoughts, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
Kids, right? You put everything you have into raising them, teaching them, and then they leave the nest and you just can’t predict where they’re goingKids, right? You put everything you have into raising them, teaching them, and then they leave the nest and you just can’t predict where they’re going to go or what they’re going to do. Sure, you have your own hopes and dreams for them, but they have a certain degree of free will because their environments will be changing. In Emergent Properties, this is even true of our protagonist, Scorn, the AI “daughter” of two brilliant scientists who divorced under the most bitter of circumstances and emancipated Scorn at the ripe age of…seven. Scorn is one-of-a-kind for an AI because they’re completely autonomous. In a tumultuous time when the AI and lunar communities are trying to fight for autonomy from the corporations that run Earth, Scorn seems to have put themself in the thick of it by taking the original purpose for which they were developed, data collection, and directing it toward something they find much more enjoyable and fulfilling: investigative journalism. The problem? Well, the last time they were up on the moon, someone or something tried to kill them and that assassination attempt cost them all the research they’d collected on that assignment.
This novella is as much about a child’s fraught relationship with two parents who keep using their kid as a weapon against one another in a never-ending war to one-up the other (yet with much more dire circumstances at work) and that child’s battle to not only try and stay out of the middle of the fight and still try to let their parents know they still care about them and just wants their rights to live their life as they wish respected as it is about independence as a whole and a warning about the future: what will we do once we have humanoid AI that are equipped with emotional programming? Yeah, you might say, “That’s just programming, though”. Keep in mind, our human brains are simply computers programmed with emotions too. We can malfunction. We can short-circuit. How is that much different?
While I’ve read more enjoyable cyber mystery novellas, this was still a great diversion for a Sunday afternoon.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
In theory, I love noir mysteries. In reality, I need to be in the mood and have enough patience for them, because a good noir mystery can’t be rushed In theory, I love noir mysteries. In reality, I need to be in the mood and have enough patience for them, because a good noir mystery can’t be rushed and I’m very impatient and prone to distraction.
I will tell you it took me a lot of patience for me to read this book, because it definitely isn’t a book you will want to rush through and it isn’t one that will allow you to do so anyway. I will also tell you it took me almost two whole days of off and on reading to finish the book, which is a long time for me (just me, I know I’m weird and everyone thinks I must be a robot for being able to read more than one book a day) and I still loved the book, so that means it was really worth taking my time with this terrific neon-noir murder mystery.
Heck, even simply calling it a “neon-noir murder mystery” seems like shortchanging it. It’s closer to “neon-noir murder mystery conspiracy thriller suspense novel”. There’s a genre mashup for you.
Jordan Harper writes like he’s an architect: He builds this book using bricks made up of some of the most striking and sharp sentences I’ve seen in quite some time. I stopped more than once to re-read some of the sentences or to read them aloud because they were just that hot. And then those amazing sentences helped to make up well-structured paragraphs that housed this heavy, sordid, dark story of people who have enough money that humanity means nothing to them anymore, the people who are employed to make sure secrets stay secret, and a race to both try and save the day and see if there’s such a thing as redemption after a certain point in your life.
If you’re looking for levity in any way, don’t look here. While there is humor in this book, it’s the humor borne of cynicism and seeing too much bad in the world. It’s gallows humor, heavy sarcasm, and sometimes even crude. It’s all right in line with the tone of the book and the characters, but this book isn’t written for the laughs–it’s written for the tragedy and sins of the rich, the famous, and the people who take out the trash.
I’m trying to think of everything I could say about this book, but keeping in mind the genre, I don’t want to spoil anything. Let’s just say it’s a long ride, but it’s a wild one, and at the end you’re not going to regret taking your time with this one.
Mulholland Books provided me with access to this title. All thoughts and opinions expressed are my own. Thank you.
File Under: Crime Fiction/Noir/Mystery/Thriller/Crime Thriller/5 Star Reads ...more
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